IDC rates Dropbox sync performance as “best-in-class”

Fast, efficient sync technology is one of the many reasons people choose Dropbox. And leading industry analyst IDC agrees: their independent “EFSS Evaluation Guide” names Dropbox sync performance as best-in-class.

For this study, IDC compared the Dropbox sync client against other products in the Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) space, including Microsoft’s OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, and Egnyte. And after a series of tests that evaluated performance in several key areas, IDC concluded that Dropbox sync technology delivers “by far, the fastest update performance.” IDC’s tests also show that Dropbox offers businesses “the fastest upload and download speeds for a large file by a significant margin.” And Dropbox sync is smart, saving time, network costs, and bandwidth by only syncing file changes instead of the whole file over and over again.

Helping customers work smarter and faster

We don’t work in a vacuum. We collaborate with colleagues on all kinds of files across devices and platforms, in offices around the world. “Sync is often overlooked or under-tested when evaluating EFSS services because it is something that essentially happens in the background. However, sync is a crucial part of any EFSS service,” said Chandana Gopal, research manager at IDC. “Our evaluation shows, for example, that the top performer on something as common as a sync update is more than 13 times faster than the slowest performer. That kind of performance difference matters, ultimately impacting end-user adoption, productivity and satisfaction.”

For teams, seconds and minutes saved add up to countless hours of gained productivity. IDC reports that Dropbox has “by far the fastest performing sync” on their Initial Update and Sync test, taking just 12 seconds to upload a 20MB PowerPoint file, against a group average of 70 seconds. A 4GB MPEG video file took an average of 34.2 minutes to sync across devices, end to end. It took our group of competitors a a total average syncing time of 109.8 minutes. And with these large files, IDC also says that Dropbox “works instantaneously and files appear on the recipient’s desktop very quickly.” We also “recovered nicely from a network interruption,” so your files will get where they need to, even if your connectivity is spotty.

Please note: Sometimes we blog about upcoming products or features before they’re released, but timing and exact functionality of these features may change from what’s shared here. The decision to purchase our services should be made based on features that are currently available.